


stemming from this moment

by lofty



Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Soen no Kiseki/Akatsuki no Megami | Fire Emblem Path of Radiance/Radiant Dawn
Genre: Gen, M/M, Mostly Gen, but subtle buds of romance if you squinthinthint, mostly just navel-gazing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-21
Updated: 2018-05-21
Packaged: 2019-05-09 18:00:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14720925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lofty/pseuds/lofty
Summary: They reminisce about the roots of their past while marveling at how their future spreads up before them. Soren longs for the sky to be the limit, but for now, the illusion is nice to hold onto. Mostly, this is just a conversation shared between the two sometime after the events of RD, with some introspection offered mostly from Soren's end.





	stemming from this moment

**Author's Note:**

> I dunno; I cranked this out all at once really fast and decided to just spill it out all over Ao3, so enjoy my introspective garble about two characters who already have a lot of fics written about them (FOR A GOOD REASON!). Who knows if a similar idea has been done before or not? I feel like I see this question asked a lot in the IkeSoren tag. Mostly this is just a story with a lot of warm fuzzy optimism put into it. It's also not edited very well, but I just decided to throw my care over to the birds. Maybe I'll spruce it up later?

Alone, he sits by a tree at the edge of the forest to stay out of the baking heat while he undoes the ties that bind his hair, which had mussed and collected debris from training. A tangle of roots join together as a sturdy trunk with a hollow in the center, climbing higher until it breaks across the sky in a massive cloud of dense, sun-soaked foliage. A wall of trees curtains him off from the laid-back activity of the village. The peace borne from the war’s end is still young and brimming with a new optimism.

Everywhere the Greil Mercenaries pass, the people venerate them as heroes. Ike’s name never goes unsung. He attracts throngs of admirers who cheer and fawn over him once they catch wise to who he is. One would think after years of accolades Ike would grow accustomed to the praise showered upon him, or perhaps even begin to embrace it, but Soren can scry the uneasiness pulling at his features every time someone strikes conversation to the tune of blue flames or radiant heroes.

The man bigger than life itself comes forth from the village into the clearing, the sun’s gentle rays beaming down upon him like a multitude of heaven’s rays fighting over his presence, until the Radiant Hero is absorbed by the same shade Soren perches beneath. Their acknowledgment of each other’s company comes with no ceremony: silent, comfortable, and natural. There were no surprises in his approach, either. Soren could recognize the heavy, steady purpose of his footsteps crunching the understory without needing to lift an eye in verification. Besides, nobody else would be seeking him, especially not out here.

“It’s still incredible,” muses Ike. “Every town, every village we visit. Beorc and laguz live side by side, as neighbors and friends. Even here in this tiny Gallian settlement, they’re working together. Their kids play together. It’s nice.”

It’s difficult to accept, an unreal reality for Soren, whose life had been permeated by divisions. Nonetheless, he would have to be blind to deny it. Ike wears such a look of serenity that even Soren can fall into his mood.

“Yes. It’s almost as though the past has ceased to exist.”

“It’s an ugly past, that’s for sure.” He rests one foot onto a big, burly root and appreciates the village from the outskirts of it beyond Soren’s head. Soren does not turn to look the same direction, instead focuses on someone much closer to him. From this angle, he can really understand just how tall he’s grown over the years. In fact, he’s so gripped by his private observations that his hands still at the ends of his hair. 

A boy about his age with bright blue inquisitive eyes flashes before his recollection, holding out a hand with no guile or mockery playing beneath the surface of his intentions like so many others. Now standing before him that boy spreads up and out into a man, still bright, no longer quite so innocent but still pure as ever. He’s carried the world on his shoulders, witnessed its ugliness unfurl and still never let it taint the beautiful straightforwardness of his principles. He’s broken down only to rebuild, and he reshaped all of Tellius along with him.

“But we fought to change it.”

Soren crouches to his knees, glancing at the vacant hollow before dragging his eyes across the leaf litter thoughtfully. “It really is a different place, isn’t it? Especially when compared to twenty years ago.”

“Yeah.” Ike forsakes the bustle of beorc and laguz for his staff officer and friend. “But you probably know it more keenly than I do.”

“…Perhaps, in my own way. I am neither beorc nor laguz, so it might be a little different for me.”

“I don’t see how you should be precluded. People shouldn’t have any reason to fear you now that both races are coming to understand one another. If anything, you’re a living representation of the union between them. That’s pretty powerful, if you ask me.”

Soren tries to swim past all the self-loathing induced by ignorance and the excerpts scrawled in books about taboo unions to break for the rationale of Ike’s perspective. “I hope you are right. In any case, nobody has hurled a vase at my skull in a long while, so I will consider that an improvement.”

Ike winces at the suggestion. “Well, good. I wouldn’t allow it to stand if that happened.”

“I know you wouldn’t.”

The past few years spent marching with the mercenary company, then under the banner of the Crimean army, and even later, the Laguz Alliance, come back to Soren. One recollection in particular stands at attention. It’s etched into his memory, the briny stench of the sea blowing in his face, a pair of catlike ears popping free of the hood that disguised them, the shriek warning villagers of a sub-human afoot and the invectives slung at Ranulf as the air was peppered by cracking knuckles and the impact of skin and sinew under fists and shoes. He could see without seeing the hair standing on the end of Ike’s neck as he took an indignant stand against a brand of violence he never had to make sense of, not until then. Most folks imagine the divine chaos surging from his blade when they regale Ike with his Blue Flame moniker, but when Soren sees blue flames in him, he sees it flash in his eyes whenever an injustice falls upon someone dear to him. His eyes had burned then, too, for Ranulf.

He stoked them a few times himself, those flickering, angry blues. As Ike’s battles raged across Tellius, Soren’s were fought within himself, against an identity that would threaten to isolate him even further from the lives of beorc and laguz, and most fearfully, Ike. The more he learned of the Branded, the more despicable he felt. He should have been able to decipher the blaze in Ike’s eyes correctly as he recounted his cruel past’s misfortunes as casually as describing a day at the market; he knew Ike well enough, and yet, his fears of rejection and loneliness had strangled his heart into tricking his mind. Those flames weren’t leaping out at him, but at the people who had caused Soren such grief. 

Those battles that raged across Tellius were not Ike’s alone to fight; Soren had been there by his side to ensure his success. They fought against towering odds together with their growing armies. From an opening beyond the trunks and foliage, Soren watches as a young beorc villager crowns a cat laguz with a snow-white lily that matches the one tucked by her ear. She reaches up to touch it, tickling the other girl into laughter, which serves to make the laguz smile in turn as she flicks her pointy ear and watches the flower float to the dirt road between their feet. Ike’s silence catches Soren’s attention, and he notices that they had been witnessing the same scene. His lips are stretched into a fond smile.

“This is what I like to believe I helped fight for.”

Soren eschews a response for submerging into thoughts spurred by his previous ones. Ike fought to liberate Crimea once. He fought for the sake of his father’s memory. He fought to avenge him. He fought for the laguz, he fought for all of humanity’s right to exist. His eyes migrate to the hollow of this tree. Somewhere in there, he had been fighting for him, too, against a world that wanted to erase him.

Never in all his fantasies would he dare to imagine the boy he met that fateful day would ever grow up to pave a world in which he, too, could fit in without being persecuted for it. From the moment that little boy with the sandwich extended his hand to him, he could weigh his importance to him in his heart, but he could never predict to what lengths he would reach him. Everywhere he went, he changed the minds of the people with his valorous actions, the courage to speak up and unify differences. Where Soren accepted that it was how the world was and the only thing left to do was adapt to it, Ike never acquitted such mindsets. He never bent to people’s prejudices. Instead, he bent the shape of theirs.

He bent the shape of the world into one that would more readily accommodate Soren.

It had never been Ike’s ultimate aim, but all along, he had been fighting Soren’s battles. This morning, he ran into a grocer he managed to recognize despite the sprawl of years separating him from the memory of her. It must have been the mole perched next to her nose, or the way her brow opened up every time her eyes met someone, but she was less heavyset than before and had a few more gray hairs poking from her tidy little bonnet. Her brow popped when she laid her gaze upon Soren, targeting his forehead directly after, but it was a more pronounced expression of surprise as she dropped a few onions from the bundle currently cradled in her arms. She didn’t need to say anything for Soren to understand that she recognized him, as well.

Her weight and her age hadn’t been the only things that changed. After her clumsy spill, he subconsciously bristled, half-expecting her to hurtle the rest of her onions at him in a bid to shoo him off and stop smelling up the place with his foul curse, but instead, she offered a self-conscious smile and greeted him like most any other customer, albeit affected by her uneasiness. The pleasantness of her bearing had been nothing but a veneer, and Soren never prompted her to remember him; he only picked up the vegetables she dropped, handed them back, and excused himself after she tried selling him wares. Something inside of her had morphed. He could detect her guilt seeping out of the crinkled smile she wore for him.

A long time ago, he had begged her for a morsel to eat. Now, she asked if she could interest him in anything. This exchange was a litmus test for comparing the past to the present.

Ike pulls him out of his musings with his awestricken voice. “Hey, Soren…”

“Yes?”

The hero of Tellius peers up into the arboreal heavens, touching the bark with enough care that his thumb stroked its tough ridges. “This tree…”

Soren nods his head down and bends to the will of the private smile curling his lips. “And here, I thought you wouldn’t remember. I must have underestimated your memory.”

“That’s not nice.” He steps onto the bulging network of roots next to Soren’s. “I mean, you have a good reason to doubt my ability to remember, but… I do.”

“And?” Soren lifts his head to meet Ike’s insistent eyes. They’re blue, and they dance. Not like angry flames, but the ripple of waves when the sun plays with them. He meant to extinguish his smile, but all of a sudden, he finds himself incapable of it.

“This tree has really grown, hasn’t it?”

The archsage sends his eyes up into the boughs for Ike’s sake. The leaves tremble and sway in the balmy breeze, collecting and diffusing summer’s heavy light. Roots curl into a trunk that shoots for the sky, its branches unfurling into a broad canopy more splendid than ever before. Ike, too, has grown, from a young kid scavenging for nice sticks to substitute for training swords to hurling real ones with the practiced ease of an inveterate warrior. The two stand next to each other before him, tall, imposing, but each a refuge. Looking upon it any other time would have no affect on his soul, but right now, a kind of satisfactory peace settles within him.

“…Yes,” he replies after a thoughtful pause. Then, after another, he adds, “…Which would you say has grown faster? Us, or the tree?”

Ike grins as he towers over Soren, mischievousness playing at the corners. “Not you, that’s for sure.” 

Soren shutters his eyelids halfway in an attempt to shoot him a deadpan stare, but he finds too much amusement in his remark, even though it’s at his expense. “Very funny. Should I curl up into the hollow again for old time’s sake, just to check?” He receives a hearty chuckle for his reaction, and Ike settles down to sit at Soren’s level, arms dangling between his legs. 

“If you want my serious answer, I think we’ve grown in more ways than a tree ever could.”

Soren ducks his gaze away at this point, overcome by sentimentality and a little embarrassed for it. He opts to stare at their feet pointed at each other, Ike’s boots larger than his to an almost comical degree. “You, especially.”

“No, not just me.” He keeps focused on Soren in hopes that he would draw his attention back up to him again so he could see just how sincerely he means what he’s saying, though he’s fully aware he’s paying keen mind to their conversation. “You’ve grown a lot, too, in your own ways. Heck, without you around, I probably wouldn’t have made it even to Port Toha all those years ago.”

The smaller man quirks an eyebrow. “Now who’s doing the underestimating?”

“You again, apparently,” Ike retorts with a smirk. “I may have been exaggerating with that statement, but I mean every word when I say I could never have handled what came after my father’s death without your guidance. All the conflicts we fought through forced you to hone your skills for me, and I really appreciate it.”

Soren nods. “I was only performing my duties as your staff officer and tactician. There is no need to make such a big deal of my accomplishments.”

“But I was about to add more to that. You haven’t grown in just mind, Soren. I think you’ve grown as a person, too.”

To this, Soren grows markedly less at ease, frowning almost to the point of a pout. “Come off it… This is where our opinions diverge.”

“Hear me out.” Ike straightens up, offering the tree another look. “When I first met you, it was right here, under this tree.” He points his gaze back to Soren, who glances at it only to skirt his sights away, burrowing them into the hollow he’d been hiding in when Ike crept close with those curious eyes of his. “Yeah, right there. The person I’m looking at right now is no longer fending for himself, hungry and alone and deprived of human warmth. It’s a slow process, but little by little, you’re opening up to others. Becoming more comfortable with who you are. Permitting me to understand so much of you, even the parts you find unpleasant. It… means a lot to me. I’m glad I remembered when we met, no matter how painful it is. It lets me realize just how far you’ve come along.”

Listening to him go on about his improvements like this is like staring into direct sunlight for too long, and Soren cannot train his head to orient toward Ike’s, even if he would love to see what kind of face he must be making at him. He can make an easy guess, but beholding it for himself is quite another issue. He empties a sigh. “As I’ve said… I only did what I could to survive.”

“It’s impressive that you did, given your circumstances. And I’m glad for it. The world should be glad for it. You helped change it, you know. I shouldn’t be the one getting all the credit.”

“Call me selfish, but I’m quite happy you’re getting the brunt of the praise, and not me,” quips Soren, finally able to cock a wry, lopsided grin at him once he has shielded his growing sentimentality with a sardonic front. Playfully, Ike reaches out to ruffle his hair, to which Soren protests with a groan, tries to grab at Ike’s hand and snaps with no real bite, “I just retied that up!”

“You’ve done it a million times; you can do it again,” Ike replies. He lets go and lowers his hand, Soren’s still fastened to his one. They find themselves adhered this way for longer than necessary, Ike letting his hand linger near Soren, Soren not releasing his grip even when his mussed hair has been freed. The self-consciousness seeps in very slowly, and then, all at once, and Soren lets go like his hand was a hot pan, the evidence of the burn manifesting in his cheeks rather than his fingertips. Ike takes his hand back. For a few beats, silence chokes them. Neither of them know how to put that into words. Still, with nothing but birdsong, cicadas, and village activity between them, they feel naked. 

Ike’s mind rotates on the axis of their deeper conversation, so he proceeds from there, finding it a suitable conduit to express some of the feelings he couldn’t quite squeeze out. “I know others need their credit where it’s due, but I think you deserve special mention. We make quite a team, you and I.”

There is nothing Soren would rather hear. “…I won’t contest that. If you only so much as asked, I would follow you to the ends of Tellius.” He pauses, weighing whether he should add his next bit or not, and settles, because he’s sure Ike already knows his feelings. “There is no place I would rather be than by your side.”

Ike smiles, fond, warm, inviting, and Soren sees it all. “Actually, I’ve been thinking about that for a while. Traveling to the ends of Tellius. When things settle down, when the Greil Mercenaries starts to fragment, I’ve been unable to scratch this itch I’ve been having to leave everything behind for a while and go on a journey.”

Soren tries to decode extra underlying meaning behind his admission, divining his features like they were oracles that would point to the future he speaks of. The cold dread that plunges through his heart could stop it from beating. “Everything?”

“Well, not everything. I won’t bring much, but I won’t bring more than what’s necessary.”

Curse his heart; it didn’t have the dignity to stop, but it did enforce that annoying chokehold on his brain, squeezing out any rational thoughts about how Ike just said he was instrumental to victory, that he valued them as a team. No, instead, he frets about the word _necessary_ and wonders just how necessary dragging him along would be. To Ike, absolutely necessary usually entailed his sword, the clothes on his back, and perhaps some rations and medical supplies. He chews on this like he’s biting his lip but says nothing to it except, “I see…”

Ike knows Soren very well by now. “And that’s why, when the time comes, I would like to bring you along.”

Soren sits up. “Me? Why me?” He squints. “Of… Of all people?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” He cants his head. “Your companionship means a lot to me, Soren. It always has.”

Soren swallows, ever afraid of dropping the gate sealing his heart lest it be bludgeoned while left unguarded. “Are you suggesting that you don’t feel the same way about the companionship others have to offer you?” His insecurities rear up. He counts how many options of Ike’s seem better, and more, well, _companionable_ than an embittered, taciturn tactician, broken enough that he has often caught himself suspecting Ike mostly continued seeking his friendship out of a sense of pity or obligation.

“No, I’m not saying that. I’m just trying to say that, if I could pick any one person to bring with me on a long journey… I would pick you.”

“I suppose it makes sense to have someone like your previous staff officer accompany you.”

“It’s not just about your efficiency, Soren. Geez. How am I going to pound this through your skull? It’s about how much I value you as a person. As a friend. As… a companion. I would like you by my side. And a journey like that is going to be a long one. And… I’d like to share it with you. Is that so wrong?”

Soren’s scarlet eyes have gone glassy. He shakes his head as though in a trance, still searching the heartfelt depth of Ike’s expression as he slowly lowers his defenses. “I… I, too, share these feelings. You’re the one I cherish most. If you were to leave me behind, I… wouldn’t know where I belong anymore.”

His smile falls. “Soren…”

“It’s the truth. Before you asked me to go with, I was worried I was lumped into the category deemed ‘unnecessary’. And with everyone following their own paths, I would have nowhere to… nowhere to call my place. I would never dream of using my talents for anyone but you. Bereft of a purpose, I would drift, wanton in the wind without you to ground me in place…” He sets his hand on the trunk of the tree, grateful that this hypothetical situation would remain as such. “So thank you, Ike. For choosing me.”

It all stemmed from that moment beneath this tree, and culminated into this one, where they vowed to remain by each other’s side for another stretching span of years. It’s satisfying, like completing a circle. Soren’s mind draws to this idea like a bee mad for honey, a hole bored into his chest where sap oozes out of it. Ike is in much the same straits, though he would rather not dwell on an aimless Soren unable to live life just because he wasn’t there.

“I’m glad it makes you happy.”

“Ike… You have no idea.”

Finally, the urge overwhelms him, and Soren leaves his root for Ike’s. He’d never done this before, been the one to initiate an embrace, but here his emotions guide him. He’s steered by similar feelings that had found condolence in Ike’s arms before, in the Tower of Guidance, when the recollection of him and the hollow by the roots of this tree had been rekindled by the termination of the seal barring Ike’s first memory of him. This time, however, he’s not wracked by sobs, but elated. He doesn’t examine his feelings too closely, but he yearns to feel their bond manifest in a physical way, and this hits the spot. It’s disgustingly vulnerable of him, but he feels safe enough in Ike’s company to trust him with this transparent show of it.

At first, Ike reacts with natural surprise: Soren isn’t one to dole affection, but here he is, crawling into his arms and latching on. It takes him a few seconds to mentally adjust to this reality, but he embraces the situation with one of his own, securing the smaller mercenary into the breadth of his arms with quiet passion. He really has grown, hasn’t he? And he’s not even finished; Soren still unfurls before him, spreading out of himself like the branches of their tree. His voice buzzes close to his ear, close enough to vibrate through his being.

“Then I would like to live out the rest of our lives this way.”

Soren nods, electing to ignore their disparity in lifespans for this moment and focus on the sentiment that fuels not only Ike’s wish, but how snugly his arms fold around him. It makes him feel like they have an eternity spread out before them.

**Author's Note:**

> i guess you could say they both arbor a love for each other
> 
> ey ey ey ey???
> 
> ;)


End file.
